During scene viewing, semantic information in the scene has been shown to play a dominant role in... more During scene viewing, semantic information in the scene has been shown to play a dominant role in guiding fixations compared to visual salience (e.g., Henderson & Hayes, 2017). However, scene viewing is sometimes disrupted by cognitive processes unrelated to the scene. For example, viewers sometimes engage in mind-wandering, or having thoughts unrelated to the current task. How do meaning and visual salience account for fixation allocation when the viewer is mind-wandering, and does it differ from when the viewer is on-task? We asked participants to study a series of real-world scenes in preparation for a later memory test. Thought probes occasionally occurred after a subset of scenes to assess whether participants were on-task or mind-wandering. We used salience maps (Graph-Based Visual salience; Harel et al., 2007) and meaning maps (Henderson & Hayes, 2017) to represent the distribution of visual salience and semantic richness in the scene, respectively. Because visual salience an...
Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement par... more Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eye movements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements naturally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive processing during MW. The current study used Recurrence Quantification Analysis (Anderson, Bischof, Laidlaw, Risko, & Kingstone, 2013) to describe the pattern of re-fixations (fixations directed to previously-inspected regions) during MW. Participants completed a real-world scene encoding task and responded to thought probes assessing intentional and unintentional MW. Both types of MW were associated with worse memory of the scenes. Importantly, RQA showed that scanpaths during unintentional MW were more repetitive than during on-task episodes, as indicated by a higher re-fixation rate and more stereotypical fixation sequences. This increased repe...
Instructional videos are widely used to study teachers’ professional vision. A new technological ... more Instructional videos are widely used to study teachers’ professional vision. A new technological development in video research is mobile eye-tracking (MET). It has the potential to provide fine-grained insights into teachers’ professional vision in action, but has yet been scarcely employed. We addressed this research gap by using MET video feedback to examine how expert and novice teachers differed in their noticing and weighing of alternative teaching strategies. Expert and novice teachers’ lessons were recorded with MET devices. Then, they commented on what they observe while watching their own teaching videos. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that expert and novice teachers did not differ in the number of classroom events they noticed and alternative teaching strategies they mentioned. However, novice teachers were more critical of their own teaching than expert teachers, particularly when they considered alternative teaching strategies. Practical implications for the fi...
Mit der Entwicklung vollmobiler Augenbewegungsmessung ist es möglich, das Unterrichtsgeschehen bu... more Mit der Entwicklung vollmobiler Augenbewegungsmessung ist es möglich, das Unterrichtsgeschehen buchstäblich mit den Augen der Lehrkraft zu sehen und damit videografisch festzuhalten, worauf der visuelle Fokus der Lehrkraft im Unterrichtsverlauf gerichtet war. In einem Pilotprojekt wird gezeigt, dass durch den Perspektivenwechsel ein qualitativ anderes Videofeedback für angehende Lehrerinnen und Lehrer möglich wird. 23 Studierende des Lehramts wurden während des Anschauens ihres Eyetracking-Videos gebeten, ihre Gedanken frei zu artikulieren. Die Kommentare zeigen im Unterschied zu normalem Videofeedback einen stärkeren Bezug auf das Verhalten der Schülerinnen und Schüler. (DIPF/Orig.)
Chinese children first emerge during the preschool years, favor Chinese children, and are limited... more Chinese children first emerge during the preschool years, favor Chinese children, and are limited to specific aspects of mathematical competence. The base-10 structure of number names is less obvious in English than in Chinese; differences between these languages are reflected in children's difficulties learning to count. Language differences do not affect other aspects of early mathematics, including counting small sets and solving simple numerical problems. Because later mathematics increasingly involves manipulation of symbols, this early deficit in apprehending the base-10 structure of number names may provide a basis for previously reported differences in mathematical competence favoring Chinese schoolchildren.
Unlike English, Chinese uses a numerical system for naming months and days. This study explored w... more Unlike English, Chinese uses a numerical system for naming months and days. This study explored whether this difference in naming affects the development of simple calendar calculation. Eight-and 10-year-old children as well as undergraduates in China and the United States were asked to name the day or month that comes a specified time before or after a given day or month. In each age group Chinese speakers primarily used calculation based on calendar names to solve these tasks, while English speakers primarily resorted to reciting the names. The magnitude of these differences was substantial; on difficult tasks Chinese fourth graders performed at speeds comparable to those of Englishspeaking adults. Implications for models of how linguistic structure affects cognition are discussed.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Mind-wandering, or thoughts irrelevant to the current task, occurs frequently during reading. The... more Mind-wandering, or thoughts irrelevant to the current task, occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced re-reading when the reader read the so-called "garden-path jokes." In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the violation creates a semantic incongruity that needs to be resolved (e.g., "My girlfriend has read so many negative things about smoking. Therefore, she decided to quit reading."). Re-reading text prior to the punchline can help resolve the incongruity. In a main study and a pre-registered replication, participants read jokes and non-funny controls embedded in filler texts and responded to thought probes that assessed intentional and unintentional mind-wandering. Results were consistent across the two studies: Eye-tracking results show that, when the reader was not mind-wandering, jokes elicited more re-reading (from the punchline) than the non-funny controls did, and had a recall advantage over the non-funny controls. During mind-wandering, however, the additional eye movement processing and the recall advantage of jokes were generally reduced. These results show that mind-wandering is associated with reduced re-reading, which is important for resolving higher-level comprehension difficulties.
The idea of ego-depletion has been examined extensively in western cultures, but cultural backgro... more The idea of ego-depletion has been examined extensively in western cultures, but cultural background might substantially influence the understanding and effect of the concept. In the present study we used Job et al. ( ) Implicit Theories on Willpower Questionnaire to examine whether Chinese college students, compared to United States students, are less inclined to believe that willpower depletes. Applying two-group confirmatory structural equation modeling, the questionnaire with its two subscalesdepletion of mental resources (DMR) and depletion of resistance to temptation -showed consistent psychometrical qualities across both samples. As predicted, Chinese student believed less in the concept of DMR than United States students. However, Chinese students showed a stronger belief in the depletion of resisting temptation (DRT) compared to their United States counterparts, suggesting different normative contexts for the response to the two subscales across cultures.
Lectures present learners with dilemmas of where to attend and how to maintain attention over ext... more Lectures present learners with dilemmas of where to attend and how to maintain attention over extended periods of time. Learning from video lectures is susceptible to mind-wandering (MW), a mental state where attention is decoupled from the external task. Two studies looked at how MW during video lectures is reflected in changes in eye movements. In both studies, the video lecture adopted a popular display setup that consisted of a main window showing the slides and a side window showing the teacher. MW episodes were collected using experience-sampling methods (i.e., the self-caught method and the probe-caught method, Smallwood & Schooler, 2015). We used Growth Curve Analysis (Mirman, 2016) to see how eye movement measures changed over time. Results from both studies showed that, during MW, (a) fixations were increasingly more likely to land on the teacher in relation to the slides; (b) fixations remained on the slides area became longer in duration over time, which was driven by an...
As part of professional development training for mathematic teachers, we used a speech recognitio... more As part of professional development training for mathematic teachers, we used a speech recognition recorder (Language ENvironment Analysis, LENA) to create an automated teacher feedback system to help teachers monitor and limit the time they talk and to increase students' active participation in mathematics lessons. Teachers got feedback with a 12h turnaround which allowed them to see how much they and their students talked on a daily basis. In this study, we wanted to know whether a) the system indicated change in the talk pattern, b) whether more complex indicators can be developed that are useful for professional development. Based on a pilot study we were able to implement an automated feedback of quality discussion episodes which was effective in increasing the amount of teacher-student discussion.
During scene viewing, semantic information in the scene has been shown to play a dominant role in... more During scene viewing, semantic information in the scene has been shown to play a dominant role in guiding fixations compared to visual salience (e.g., Henderson & Hayes, 2017). However, scene viewing is sometimes disrupted by cognitive processes unrelated to the scene. For example, viewers sometimes engage in mind-wandering, or having thoughts unrelated to the current task. How do meaning and visual salience account for fixation allocation when the viewer is mind-wandering, and does it differ from when the viewer is on-task? We asked participants to study a series of real-world scenes in preparation for a later memory test. Thought probes occasionally occurred after a subset of scenes to assess whether participants were on-task or mind-wandering. We used salience maps (Graph-Based Visual salience; Harel et al., 2007) and meaning maps (Henderson & Hayes, 2017) to represent the distribution of visual salience and semantic richness in the scene, respectively. Because visual salience an...
Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement par... more Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eye movements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements naturally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive processing during MW. The current study used Recurrence Quantification Analysis (Anderson, Bischof, Laidlaw, Risko, & Kingstone, 2013) to describe the pattern of re-fixations (fixations directed to previously-inspected regions) during MW. Participants completed a real-world scene encoding task and responded to thought probes assessing intentional and unintentional MW. Both types of MW were associated with worse memory of the scenes. Importantly, RQA showed that scanpaths during unintentional MW were more repetitive than during on-task episodes, as indicated by a higher re-fixation rate and more stereotypical fixation sequences. This increased repe...
Instructional videos are widely used to study teachers’ professional vision. A new technological ... more Instructional videos are widely used to study teachers’ professional vision. A new technological development in video research is mobile eye-tracking (MET). It has the potential to provide fine-grained insights into teachers’ professional vision in action, but has yet been scarcely employed. We addressed this research gap by using MET video feedback to examine how expert and novice teachers differed in their noticing and weighing of alternative teaching strategies. Expert and novice teachers’ lessons were recorded with MET devices. Then, they commented on what they observe while watching their own teaching videos. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that expert and novice teachers did not differ in the number of classroom events they noticed and alternative teaching strategies they mentioned. However, novice teachers were more critical of their own teaching than expert teachers, particularly when they considered alternative teaching strategies. Practical implications for the fi...
Mit der Entwicklung vollmobiler Augenbewegungsmessung ist es möglich, das Unterrichtsgeschehen bu... more Mit der Entwicklung vollmobiler Augenbewegungsmessung ist es möglich, das Unterrichtsgeschehen buchstäblich mit den Augen der Lehrkraft zu sehen und damit videografisch festzuhalten, worauf der visuelle Fokus der Lehrkraft im Unterrichtsverlauf gerichtet war. In einem Pilotprojekt wird gezeigt, dass durch den Perspektivenwechsel ein qualitativ anderes Videofeedback für angehende Lehrerinnen und Lehrer möglich wird. 23 Studierende des Lehramts wurden während des Anschauens ihres Eyetracking-Videos gebeten, ihre Gedanken frei zu artikulieren. Die Kommentare zeigen im Unterschied zu normalem Videofeedback einen stärkeren Bezug auf das Verhalten der Schülerinnen und Schüler. (DIPF/Orig.)
Chinese children first emerge during the preschool years, favor Chinese children, and are limited... more Chinese children first emerge during the preschool years, favor Chinese children, and are limited to specific aspects of mathematical competence. The base-10 structure of number names is less obvious in English than in Chinese; differences between these languages are reflected in children's difficulties learning to count. Language differences do not affect other aspects of early mathematics, including counting small sets and solving simple numerical problems. Because later mathematics increasingly involves manipulation of symbols, this early deficit in apprehending the base-10 structure of number names may provide a basis for previously reported differences in mathematical competence favoring Chinese schoolchildren.
Unlike English, Chinese uses a numerical system for naming months and days. This study explored w... more Unlike English, Chinese uses a numerical system for naming months and days. This study explored whether this difference in naming affects the development of simple calendar calculation. Eight-and 10-year-old children as well as undergraduates in China and the United States were asked to name the day or month that comes a specified time before or after a given day or month. In each age group Chinese speakers primarily used calculation based on calendar names to solve these tasks, while English speakers primarily resorted to reciting the names. The magnitude of these differences was substantial; on difficult tasks Chinese fourth graders performed at speeds comparable to those of Englishspeaking adults. Implications for models of how linguistic structure affects cognition are discussed.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Mind-wandering, or thoughts irrelevant to the current task, occurs frequently during reading. The... more Mind-wandering, or thoughts irrelevant to the current task, occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced re-reading when the reader read the so-called "garden-path jokes." In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the violation creates a semantic incongruity that needs to be resolved (e.g., "My girlfriend has read so many negative things about smoking. Therefore, she decided to quit reading."). Re-reading text prior to the punchline can help resolve the incongruity. In a main study and a pre-registered replication, participants read jokes and non-funny controls embedded in filler texts and responded to thought probes that assessed intentional and unintentional mind-wandering. Results were consistent across the two studies: Eye-tracking results show that, when the reader was not mind-wandering, jokes elicited more re-reading (from the punchline) than the non-funny controls did, and had a recall advantage over the non-funny controls. During mind-wandering, however, the additional eye movement processing and the recall advantage of jokes were generally reduced. These results show that mind-wandering is associated with reduced re-reading, which is important for resolving higher-level comprehension difficulties.
The idea of ego-depletion has been examined extensively in western cultures, but cultural backgro... more The idea of ego-depletion has been examined extensively in western cultures, but cultural background might substantially influence the understanding and effect of the concept. In the present study we used Job et al. ( ) Implicit Theories on Willpower Questionnaire to examine whether Chinese college students, compared to United States students, are less inclined to believe that willpower depletes. Applying two-group confirmatory structural equation modeling, the questionnaire with its two subscalesdepletion of mental resources (DMR) and depletion of resistance to temptation -showed consistent psychometrical qualities across both samples. As predicted, Chinese student believed less in the concept of DMR than United States students. However, Chinese students showed a stronger belief in the depletion of resisting temptation (DRT) compared to their United States counterparts, suggesting different normative contexts for the response to the two subscales across cultures.
Lectures present learners with dilemmas of where to attend and how to maintain attention over ext... more Lectures present learners with dilemmas of where to attend and how to maintain attention over extended periods of time. Learning from video lectures is susceptible to mind-wandering (MW), a mental state where attention is decoupled from the external task. Two studies looked at how MW during video lectures is reflected in changes in eye movements. In both studies, the video lecture adopted a popular display setup that consisted of a main window showing the slides and a side window showing the teacher. MW episodes were collected using experience-sampling methods (i.e., the self-caught method and the probe-caught method, Smallwood & Schooler, 2015). We used Growth Curve Analysis (Mirman, 2016) to see how eye movement measures changed over time. Results from both studies showed that, during MW, (a) fixations were increasingly more likely to land on the teacher in relation to the slides; (b) fixations remained on the slides area became longer in duration over time, which was driven by an...
As part of professional development training for mathematic teachers, we used a speech recognitio... more As part of professional development training for mathematic teachers, we used a speech recognition recorder (Language ENvironment Analysis, LENA) to create an automated teacher feedback system to help teachers monitor and limit the time they talk and to increase students' active participation in mathematics lessons. Teachers got feedback with a 12h turnaround which allowed them to see how much they and their students talked on a daily basis. In this study, we wanted to know whether a) the system indicated change in the talk pattern, b) whether more complex indicators can be developed that are useful for professional development. Based on a pilot study we were able to implement an automated feedback of quality discussion episodes which was effective in increasing the amount of teacher-student discussion.
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